Comments:
Ever since I was a kid, I've been in love with aircraft, I could name practically every military aircraft by sight, and quite a few by sound. And not just modern aircraft, oh no, I had WWII planes too though it probably helped that I lived right by the airport that housed the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, home of one of two flying Lancaster bombers. But hey, it helped fuel my interest, so I donít mind.

Then as I grew up, I got into anime, and one day while stumbling around I learned of Macross Zero, it wasn't my first aircraft anime, but it was my first taste of the Macross saga, and so I watched it, and waited for the final installment to appear, but I knew, the moment I saw the first episode, I knew I wanted to make an AMV for this anime, but it hadn't been fully released yet, so I had to wait. So I looked to other things, then finally it came out, the final episode, and it only further fuelled my desire to make an AMV for it.

But now, I needed a song, and that was my biggest problem, none of the songs I had seemed to work with it. So I put this on the back burner and looked to another Macross series, the original Macross, I had seen it, I had an idea for it, so I thought about starting an AMV for it, but then that idea fell through, by now it was early December, and I needed to start working on an AMV for AnimeNorth'05, thatís when my buddy Jethro told me about Airmaster, he had been talking about it for forever, told me it was a great show, so I downloaded it, and he gave me an idea for an AMV for it, well, just the song, Korn's "Somebody Someone", but I never ended up liking Airmaster. But after listening to the song a few times, it hit me; this was the song I had been looking for, for Macross Zero.

So now I had it, I had the video, I had the song, and I had the idea, now it was time to edit. For the first few weeks, it was really slow, editing a few hours each day, getting it done little by little, then I just stopped. I didn't edit for over a week, didn't even open up a program for any stage of editing, and I started to doubt the project's completion. Then one day, I sat down and watched Macross Zero again, and it rekindled my interest in the anime, and the project. So once again, I was back to editing little by little, getting around 10seconds done each day I edited. Things were looking up, I was finally getting somewhere, I was editing at a good pace, and would easily be able to finish editing in time for the entry date in April. Then, to my surprise, I had a boost in editing, stayed up one night and edited an entire minute of video in one sitting, a huge achievement for me to say the least, but the good times were about to come crashing down. I had just finished editing that minute, rendered the timeline, and to my horror, part of the timeline was not showing up in the output screen. It was black video where there should have been anime, the audio worked fine, in the timeline the preview on some of the clips were noise where it should have held an image, and some were simply black. I was scared, worried that something had screwed up and I had lost all the editing I had done. I spent over an hour trying to figure out what was wrong; exporting clips here and there to see if it was just the preview in the program, to my horror, it wasn't. The weirdest part was, the clips would not work IN the program, but if I took the original source of that clip and played it outside the program, they worked fine, not a problem at all. So eventually I just gave up and called it a night, shut down my computer for some desperately needed downtime. I woke up the next day and went back to trying to figure out the problem. No good, couldn't figure it out, but now new clips were not working, and some of the other clips that weren't working the previous night were, I was baffled, but decided to just continue editing, hoping someone would know what was wrong. Well, I finished editing even with all the problems, and exported the sequence, only to find, parts of it were black, so I exported again, and again, until finally I got a working copy. Encoded it so I could watch it, found all the problems in the editing, thanks to my buddy Jethro, went back and edited the problems out, and once again did the dance with the export until it worked. Made the bumpers, encoded the video, and FINALLY I was done.

By far my best video in my opinion, but by far the worst in terms of problems I encountered along the way. I swear, the old saying, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" definitely held true with this video, fortunately though, perseverance was the key, and I was able to complete this video.